Sunday, June 25, 2017

A leg-up for male poets?

A deliberately all male poetry
line up in Glasgow? Making a marketing point of being men-only! Hah! We had them aplenty back in the last century. I had thought we’d consigned them to the dustbin of history, the neanderthal swamp…

Ironic that it’s on
at the same time as Bard in the Botanics in Glasgow is producing their ‘These Headstrong
Women’ season.

Meanwhile the
Scottish poetry world, it seems, can’t quite give up the auld ways that led to
Sandy Moffat’s painting the Poets’ Pub.

Now, there are the
finest of poets in this painting. But take a gander at how the women are represented. Peripheries, my dear. No centre stage for you. Woman, know thy place!

And where else would
Scottish poetry crawl back to for its all male line-up - as if by a miserable quirk of regressive genetics - but the home city of the knuckle-draggin wee hard
man hissel?

“Glasgow: a city
strangely devoid of women poets?” is a question I posed once before in a blog about an anthology of Glasgow poetry:

I’ve just been browsing through a book I’ve had for a
while, Noise and Smoky Breath, An
Illustrated Anthology of Glasgow Poems 1900 – 1983, published in May 1983
by Third Eye Centre and Glasgow Libraries Publications Board. It’s a beautiful
book, but 30 years on from its publication I’m stunned to see how few female
poets are featured.

There are 81 poems altogether. Of these 9 are written
by women. Four of those by the then emerging poet, Liz Lochhead.

I didn’t study
one Scottish woman poet at school. And now I know why. If women were not being published
in anthologies, if their work was not being included in the canon, how could I,
or anyone else, study them? This is how those women who did write, who did get
published against the odds, often as not had their voices subsequently erased.

And what's more, when we talk as
artists and writers about standing on the shoulders of giants, young women writers were expected to stand on the shoulders, not of the women who preceded them, but of the men.

Why should that matter, you
might ask. Why can't a woman emulate a man. Well, when it comes to poetry we are talking about voice and life
experience. And a woman’s voice and life experience can be very different from
a man’s. We understand this when it comes to race, class and culture. It holds true for the sex divide too.

"They told me: 'This is a literary
magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies' Home Journal. The true subjects of
poetry are ... male subjects...' "

Alice Munro, now a Nobel
prize-winner suffered similar put-downs.
You will know, of course, about the opposition Sylvia Plath’s poetry encountered. Anne Sexton, another great American poet of the twentieth century had to
endure sexist negativity for poems such as Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator and In Celebration of my Uterus. (Okay, Bukowski may have managed the former, but the latter would have been a bit of a push. He might have done better with Olds' Ode to a Douchebag. But I digress...)

A few years after Noise and Smoky Breath and many other anthologies failed to find those
elusive Glasgow women poets to include in their pages, women writers in
Scotland took matters into their own hands. And this is exactly why ALL-WOMEN
anthologies started up. And by extension, all-women line-ups at events to promote them.

Not as vanity projects.

Not as a wheeze.

But as political necessity!

In Edinburgh in the
1980s the women’s collective Hens in the Hay started producing pamphlets as the small publisher Stramullion. In
1989 they brought out the full-length and ground-breaking Fresh Oceans anthology, bringing
together poems by 60 living Scottish women poets established and new. This was one of the first places I was published, and it was the first collection
of its kind in Scotland.

Polygon’s Original Prints series started
up in the late 80s, giving a boost to the fledgling careers of many of
Scotland’s now established women writers in both poetry and short story. Suddenly we had the possibility of a
generation of Scottish women poets on whose shoulders the next generation might
well stand. Yes, women were also getting published elsewhere too, but there were huge imbalances. Men outnumbered women greatly. Positive discrimination was needed. Especially for working class women. We were lucky to have female editors Joy Hendry and Tessa Ransford heading up two of our leading poetry magazines, and also some enlightened male editors. In particular I recall Richard Price at Gairfish who produced the special Calemadonnas edition to showcase emerging women writers and poets.

In the 90s and noughties it
was not at all unusual for a poet like myself to go to reading after reading and
be either in a minority as a woman, or occasionally the lone woman in an all-male line up. It certainly was the norm for the men to headline. At
the launch of one magazine I congratulated the organisers on inviting me as ‘the
token woman poet’ when I took the mic. They were not well-pleased. But it was a
fair political point. They had not tried hard enough.

But, you might be
thinking, that’s all ancient history. Ah... if only! In 2014 a gig I’d read at more than once here
in Glasgow - one that sees itself as radical - accidentally billed a poetry
line-up with 11 men and one woman. It was about the Independence Referendum. An important political topic. Were our female poets' voices to be ignored? Unheard? When I contacted them to object they apologised
and tried to fix it, rather late in the day. But how could it even have happened? Because of millennia
of subtle and not-so-subtle conditioning.

Seamus Deane, the Irish
writer and editor is still wondering how he got it so wrong in the now infamous1991
Field Anthology of Irish Literature. Seamus forgot to put almost all the Irish
women writers from history in. He was genuinely shocked when it was brought to his attention. GENUINELY SHOCKED. It was meant to be a definitive work.Irish women were furious. I mean, he just didn’t realize
what he was doing. And why? Because blind misogyny was so ingrained in society. This
was a handful of miles from where we live. A man who is my contemporary. A nice
man. An educated man.

In 2000 I was sitting on
the Scottish Arts Council Grants to Publishers Committee. An application came
in for a Scottish anthology of new writing linked to a particular theme – with
almost no women included. Three male editors. All intelligent men who’d see
themselves as enlightened. I refused to give my backing for funding until they
went and actively sought out more women writers. Which they did. Because there were women writers linked to the theme there. They had failed to identify them. And simply hadn’t
noticed. Neither had anyone else on the committee until I pointed it out.

More recently you can
look at the findings of Edinburgh-based poetry reviewer Dave Coates and see that given that women are just over
50% of the population there’s still some way to go in redressing imbalances in the contemporary poetry world.

And in 2016 the
Abbey Theatre in Ireland presented a programme for the centenary of the Easter
Uprising with 9 out of 10 plays written by men. And the male director's response when that imbalance was questioned? "Them the breaks." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/13/irish-women-abbey-theatre-centenery-feminist. We are never far from sliding right back to significant under-representation of women's voices. And as the response from that male director at the Abbey shows, we are never far from brute misogyny. Anyone who thinks these battles for women are done and dusted
is, quite frankly, delusional.

So, my fellow
male poets, when asked to take part in an all-male line up, do yourselves a
favour, leave the “all-whatever line-ups” to the groups whose voices historically have been unrepresented and
under-represented. To those who have been consistently silenced and told their life experience didn't count and their voices were not welcome. When I attended Glasgow University there was an exclusively male Union. Exclusively. It hurt and angered and yes, I would say damaged me as a woman back then. It was a clear signal to me and other women we were not full members of the university. We were second class. To be honest, it was an extension of what had happened all the way through school.

A line-up in Glasgow of
all-male poets is NOT just a bit of fun. Could you say that so easily if it was
any other group of people who had been consistently sidelined, ignored,
treated as second-class and often-as-not silenced for centuries? Damned right you
couldn’t. It wouldn’t be just a bit of harmless fun. But women? Sure, we can
mess about when it comes to women. Look again at that Poets' Pub painting. Look at how the women are represented. As Glasgow playwright Ena Lamont Stewart so rightly said, Men Should Weep.

4 comments:

I know that painting well and have found it increasingly offensive as time has gone by. It was clear that the role of women was to be MUSES to the 'real' oh so masculine poets. The late sixties, early seventies, when I was living in Edinburgh, studying and writing, were a time of great change. We were only just realising how we might need to assert ourselves as women and there was a lot of encouragement which perhaps gave us a false sense of equality. In some quarters at least, it has been a constant battle ever since. You're right about the imbalance in poetry readings, anthologies, and the undoubted fact that it so often goes unnoticed by men. I wrote much less poetry as time went by, but had exactly the same problems with theatre. After a horrible experience with the director from hell with an early Lyceum production, I had two well reviewed plays at the Traverse but made no headway at all after that until the late wonderful David MacLennan produced three of my plays at the Oran Mor. Then I entered the great silence. No response to anything, not letters, not emails. Nothing. Not even the courtesy of a rejection. But really extraordinary playwrights like Ena Lamont Stewart were shamefully treated by the literary and theatrical establishment here so what did I expect? Publishing is much better than it was. For a long while, a glance at the lists of the vast majority of Scottish publishers showed a very definite bias in favour of men with male interests being the norm. And recent research on reviewing, across the whole UK, indicates that male writers are still, heaven help us, consistently reviewed in newspapers more often than women. The online world and indy publishing has helped to redress the balance, and I'm more hopeful as a playwright turned novelist than I ever was.There are some fine small publishers out there and some fine writers who just happen to be women. Fortunately, I had always written fiction, long and short as well as plays, and that's where the future lies, for me at least. But my heart still sinks when young women ask me about getting into theatre. Your post elaborates some of the reasons why.

This was a fascinating article and very well written. I have a foot in both camps. I was a young woman at the end of the 80's when misogyny was at it's most offensive. To make matters worse I worked on a press floor where I was one of two women. Our bodies and what our male colleagues wanted to do to them were routinely discussed in our presence. If we didn't find it funny or complimentary we were lesbians or frigid. Neither of which was particularly offensive to me.

However, I do think everybody should have a voice and if we have to put on separate events for women then so be it. Men are entitled to be heard today even if their voices were solely heard in the past. I agree that it is a travesty that women are left out or included in small numbers in important anthologies. Even more sadly, the most enlightened seem to overlook their part in this. We have a long way to go because even 'nice' men slip up. After Donald Trump's offensive comments about women in an 80's video, I mentioned in a Facebook group that I had heard much worse and I was told that 'maybe I had mixed in the wrong circles'. The blame was placed firmly in my court amongst a group of 'enlightened socialist males'.

So I don't know how we get there but I do know that we must keep talking about, discussing and debating this issue even when it becomes uncomfortable. Thank you for the article it was very brave and timely!:)

About Me

Magi’s recent poetry collection Washing Hugh MacDiarmid’s Socks was described in The National as “a joy to read”. Collections include Graffiti in Red Lipstick, Wild Women of a Certain Age, Kicking Back. Poems appear in Modern Scottish Women Poets (Canongate), Scottish Love Poems (Canongate), The Edinburgh Book of 20th Century Scottish Poetry, (EUP), 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems, New Writing Scotland, Original Prints, (Polygon), Meantime, Prize Winning Writing (Polygon). The Senile Dimension, won the Scotland on Sunday/Women 2000 Writing Prize. Short stories published in Damage Land, New Scottish Gothic Fiction (Polygon), and Harlot Red, (Serpents’ Tail), Northwords Now, etc. The play, Our Boys won a Tom MacGrath Award. Her filmscripts were finalists for Tartan Shorts and NewFoundLand Film Awards. Drama on BBC R4. 3 children’s novels with Puffin. She’s held 3 Scottish Arts Council Writing Fellowships, a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship, received a major Scottish Arts Council bursary, has been Writer in Residence at GoMA in Glasgow, has mentored SBT New Writers Awards, was Reader in Residence with Glasgow Women’s Library. Created Wild Women Writing.